What Makes for a Brilliant Book Cover? A Master ExplainsBy Kyle VanHemert at WIRED

If you find yourself in a bookstore, Peter Mendelsund can be hard to avoid. His dust jackets wrap big-name contemporary releases like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He’s created ingenious covers for reissues of Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and other literary giants, updating a wide swath of the canon with a striking, graphic look. Cover, a new monograph of Mendelsund’s work, showcases the designer’s uncanny talent for capturing entire books with succinct, compelling imagery—a talent that has led some to deem him the best book designer of his generation. What makes it even more remarkable is that Mendelsund started his career with zero design experience whatsoever.

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On one level, dust jackets are billboards. They’re meant to lure in potential readers. For a certain contingent of the publishing industry, this means playing it safe. “The path of least resistance when you’re designing a jacket is to give that particular demographic exactly what they want,” Mendelsund explains. “It’s a mystery novel, so you just splatter it in blood, and put the shadowy trench coat guy on it, and use the right typography.” Familiarity, the thinking goes, will always sell something.

Mendelsund does not subscribe to this view. He’s said that he prefers an ugly cover to a cliche one, and looking at his body of work, the thing that holds it together is that nearly all of his jackets have something weird going on, in one way or another.

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Of course, catching a potential book-buyer’s eye is only part of Mendelsund’s job. A truly great jacket is one that captures the book inside it in some fundamental and perhaps unforeseen way. As Mendelsund describes it, his job is “finding that unique textual detail that…can support the metaphoric weight of the entire book.” That, of course, requires actually reading a manuscript closely enough to A) determine the metaphoric weight of the book and B) find a handful of relevant details within it. In other words, making a great book cover isn’t just about making. It starts with understanding.

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Ideally, every dust jacket is unique to the book it’s wrapped around. But the realities of the marketplace often dictate how experimental a design can be. Mendelsund will have more interpretive freedom for a small volume of poetry, for example, than he does for a hotly anticipated piece of new fiction. “If you spend a lot of money on a book or an author, then you ratchet up the scrutiny the jacket’s under a lot—a hundred fold,” he says. “If this author got a big advance, then you’re going to have to jump through some flaming hoops with the jacket.”

Take The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Such was the buzz around the manuscript that when it came time to design the jacket, there were already a chorus of voices adding their take.

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The final version, sure enough, had “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” in huge type. To round it out, Mendelsund did what he describes as the “dumbass thing” of echoing the title visually on the cover itself, putting the text on top of an image of… a dragon tattoo. It was the rare case in which a novel had so much momentum that the best thing a designer could do was stay out of the way. “The book was going to sell well no matter what,” Mendelsund says.

And yet, Mendelsund insists that it wasn’t the most obvious approach he could’ve taken. The design featured at least one small victory against the obvious: the bright yellow backdrop. “Up until that point, I would defy you to find a dark gothic thriller with a day-glow cover,” he says.

A couple weeks ago I saw an article about Peter Mendelsund’s new book on book cover design; and I scoffed. Now I just saw another article on Wired, shared by Tim Ferriss.

Peter is obviously doing the rounds (and quite well) to promote his new book. Kudos to him. Here’s the big problem: Peter’s had a luxurious career as a cover design rebranding already famous and classic works of fiction, and breakout bestsellers – amazing books – supported by a heavy media campaign and a major publisher.

He’s said that he prefers an ugly cover to a cliche one, and looking at his body of work, the thing that holds it together is that nearly all of his jackets have something weird going on, in one way or another.

Looking at Peter’s work, I agree with his own take on his design philosophy. They are all creative, potentially clever, and ugly. And that’s fine – for literary fiction appealing to high brow readers. The tragic mistake is in applauding Peter’s work as a “golden measure” for book cover design, because it absolutely will not work for most books.

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You see, most authors start out with no platform and have to catch reader’s attentions. They don’t have a big media or marketing campaign. Readers aren’t going to spend more than a couple seconds looking at their cover while browsing thousands of others in the same category.

The cover has to tell readers, immediately, what the book is about and what genre it fits into.

This can’t be done by being clever or thoughtful. Nobody is going to appreciate the cognitive associations and playful visual metaphors. Not to mention that a vast majority of authors are writing popular genre fiction or non-fiction (not literary) – and while literary authors may want to adopt Peter’s style to ‘fit in’ with other literary fiction, that in itself can be accused of being cliche; in other words, books in the same genre should look similar.

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I pick the cover that is going to sell the most copies – and I’ll test it out with paid advertisements if I have to (though I’ve gotten very good at knowing which will perform the best). Selling more copies is all that matters for most authors. If you have a literary career, or are a professor, and are writing a book just to make yourself look good, then sure – go for something smart and obtuse and a little hard to figure out; something most people won’t like but a few people will think is brilliant.

But if you want to make money as an author, don’t be swayed by the sirens warning you to avoid the obvious and focus on something deeper and non-representational. Don’t worry about avoiding book cover cliches. Don’t focus on being creative. Get a damn fine cover that looks professional and immediately broadcasts the right genre. It SHOULD look a lot like the other bestselling books in the same category.

After you get enough people to buy it, read it and love it, and your name is so famous that people will buy anything you write, then you can start having fun with your book cover and taking risks with the design.

I’m not saying Peter isn’t a brilliant cover designer, of course he is. Another designer I like a lot is Chip Kidd.And I’m obviously jealous of their talents. I’m not saying I’m a better designer than they are; only that, if they had to design covers that would sell popular fiction, they would probably look entirely different – and a whole lot more like mine – than the creative samples they’ve built their careers on.

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So you have to decide what kind of author you are.

1. Are you the artist, who just wants to make an amazing book, even if nobody recognizes it in your lifetime and nobody loves and understands it like you do; you get no acknowledgment until decades after you die? Or, are you writing professional literary fiction with an established marketing campaign and recognized name? Great! Your book cover is a blank canvas.

2. Do you want people to read and like your book? Do you want hundreds of reviews? Do you want to make a bunch of money so you can write full-time? Then you better make sure your book fits the conventions of bestselling books in your genre, and appeal precisely to the readers who love that genre, and broadcast the core story message, and most importantly, make an emotional connection (in away that literary book covers almost never do, being purely conceptual).

In other words, the publishing methods that apply to famous authors are not and should not be the same for unknown authors on a small budget. You need to be more careful with how you do things. Your cover needs to look like it belongs in the top 10 books in your category.

While Peter’s new book should in no way be used as a manual for commercial book cover design, as an exercise in creative thinking and design it’s definitely worth perusing.

Dear self-published author:I can imagine how frustrating it is to have your book refused possible review coverage by the Horn Book simply because it is self-published. But here is why that situation is unlikely to change anytime soon.If we met at a party or something, I, and I think my colleagues at the other review rags, would tell you that we don’t review self-published books because there are too many of them. More than half a million such titles are published every year in this country, and I’m guessing children’s books account for at least 100,000 of those. Right now, I’m dealing with about 8,000 titles a year of traditionally published children’s books, of which we review approximately 5,000. If we were to commit to giving self-published books the same level of scrutiny we give to what we already cover, I would need to increase our staff exponentially, which is not going to happen.

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Thus my final point. Self-published children’s books seem remarkably ignorant of the great history and scope of children’s literature. You don’t need this awareness to write a good or even great book for children (I know several worthy children’s book authors who pay no attention to the field or its heritage) but you do need it to publish a good or great book for children. (Or even a terrible one. Trade publishers publish bad books all the time, but they publish them for good reasons.) An editor isn’t there to “fix mistakes.” His or her most important job is to understand what contribution your story makes–or doesn’t–to the big world of books and readers. That’s what is most missing from self-published books for children today.

He begins kindly enough: “I can imagine how frustrating it is to have your book refused possible review coverage by the Horn Book simply because it is self-published.” But then he lays out the case from the review editor’s point of view. He’s bracingly blunt.

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I contacted Sutton this morning for additional comment (and to see if he’d been assaulted yet). As I suspected, his open letter had been inspired by an e-mail exchange with a “self-pubber.” Those of us in the business know these exchanges well. They’re pretty much why I don’t answer the phone anymore. There’s always some aggressive or depressed “indie writer” on the other end insisting that his book is spectacular, unlike anything else being published today. If only I’d read 25 pages, I’d be hooked.I asked Sutton, “What do you say to the indie writer who reminds you that Walt Whitman was self-published?”

“You are not Walt Whitman,” he said

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At The Post, we’re getting about 150 books a day. A day. And these are books that had to find an agent. And then a publisher. And then were professionally edited. And now are being professionally marketed by people with money on the line. Many of these books, of course, are bad, but many — far more than we can review — are interesting, engaging, informative, moving, timely and/or newsworthy for various reasons.

All the winnowing and editing work that went on before a galley ever arrives at our door make this job possible. The idea of dumping several hundred thousand additional books on our small staff every year is terrifying.Are there great, truly great self-published books being produced — and ignored — every year?

I’m sure there are, and that’s a tragedy. But it’s not a tragedy that I can solve by reading 25 pages of every one of the 300,000 self-published book that would land in our office if we opened the door.

“I’ve read a lot of blogs lately about introverted writers, (whining), pointing out how hard it is for them, nowadays.

“There are probably more introverted authors than extroverts. After all, it’s darned near a cliché – the writer living in seclusion, typing away in obscurity. That’s all you see in movies: As Good as it Gets, Something’s Gotta Give – even, dare I mention, The Shining?Misery? (don’t throw tomatoes, I’m not judging!)

“As an extrovert, it’s killing me that the introverts get all the press, even though they shrink from it!”

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“Before I go farther, you know the difference between the two, right? In the simplest terms, an extrovert is a person who is energized by being around other people. An introvert is energized by being alone.

“But which writer has the advantage– the extrovert, or the introvert?

“Seems obvious, right? The extroverts love the promo, the press, the spotlight! They have it easier.

“Not so fast. I’m here to point out some of the disadvantages the extroverts deal with.”

(As an introvert I’m no expert on extroverts, with the possible exception of my husband who can be, for lack of a better word, loud. I’m not convinced promo is any harder or easier for me than it is for an extrovert. And there is whining on both sides. Personally, I like my peace and quiet. Do you extroverts out there carry a bigger burden? Is more expected of you? Julia Barrett)

Mike Shatzkin’s latest post is all about discovery: Finding your next book, or, the discovery problem. Every time someone from legacy publishing utters the word “discovery”, I cue up Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride. If you’ve watched the movie, you’ll know that Vizzini use the word “inconceivable” every time something happens that is outside his plan. Likewise, folks in legacy publishing uses discovery as a gloss for the changes in the industry that are outside their understanding.

One problem with the change to online buying from the discovery perspective is that the funnel for each shopper keeps getting narrower. It isn’t hard for somebody in a bookstore to look at hundreds of books in a few minutes. It’s nearly impossible online. This either requires the consumer to spend more time shopping to see the same number of titles they used to see in a store, or to make a decision having seen fewer. And the concern is that the decision that gets made having seen fewer can be not to buy anything at all. (Or, particularly in the case of tablet users, to buy something other than books.)

I think Mike is doing it wrong if he finds it harder to evaluate books online than in a bookstore. First, how long does it take you to get to the bookstore? I can get to Amazon in less than 10 seconds at any time of day and from anywhere I happen to be (with a few exceptions). Also, maybe Mike is shopping from an e-ink device or phone. I find those to be less than ideal. I prefer to do most of my shopping on either my PC with a 24-inch monitor or my iPad (through the Kindle HTML5 Store). But more importantly, I buy many books because someone recommends them and includes a link directly to Amazon’s page. That means I can buy those books with two clicks and start reading them in less than 30 seconds. The funnel to each shopper isn’t getting narrower, it’s getting broader.

He goes on to describe recommendation engines in a thoroughly muddled way, but I’m not going to fault Mike for his ignorance of the technology and design of recommendation engines. That’s not his area of expertise. My problem is that he fails to understand the market for stories.

But is this all really part of a larger problem for publishers? Is online discovery really affecting the sales patterns for books? It would appear so. One of the global ebook sellers told me during Frankfurt that their online sales are far more concentrated than publishers’ sales tended to be, with a tiny fraction of titles (under 5%) making up a huge percentage of total sales (nearly 70%). (I am assuming here that this retailer’s data is typical; of course, it may not be.) If memory serves, at the turn of the century Barnes & Noble stores saw only about 5% of their sales coming from “bestsellers” and, I believe (relying on memory of detail, which I admit is not my most powerful mental muscle) backlist outsold new titles. Publishers really live on the midlist. We know the long tail is taking an increasing share of sales and it would appear the head is too. Those sales come out of the midlist. It is pretty hard to run a profitable publisher without a profitable midlist.

Does the fact that an ebook retailer sees sales concentrated in a tiny fraction of titles mean that there is a discovery problem? No. Instead it’s evidence of how much better “discovery” works in the digital world. It’s the denominator of the fraction that’s changing the equation. That is, the number of titles available has skyrocketed so that even if there was no change in the sales patterns of successful books, the trend would be for a smaller percentage of to generate a higher percentage of the revenue. But there’s something much more interesting going on.

In the U.S. (and I suspect in most other developed countries), there are two primary groups of consumers for written narratives (stories told with words). From here on out, “books” will refer to novels and narrative non-fiction. About two-thirds of the adult population buys and reads fewer than 6 books a year. The other important group is the 12% or so that read more than 20 books a year. As we’ve moved to digital books, the behavior of these two groups has changed and both are happier. The books with broad appeal can reach more people faster as the network effects of lowering the friction for buying books takes over. That is what is driving the growth in sales for ebook bestsellers (the story in print is very different). You can see that most easily in this slide from Russ Grandinetti’s presentation at Publishers Launch Frankfurt conference.

(If you want to understand what’s going with books, you should study that whole presentation.)

But the explosion of titles has made it possible for people like me to find more books to buy and read. Most of the books I read are books that would never have found a legacy publisher. I’m no longer confined to what legacy publishers and the big chain bookstores thought would sell. I get to read historical fiction from Victorian San Francisco (M. Louisa Locke), steampunkish fantasy (Lindsay Buroker), and noir-ish detective fiction (Brian Meeks), all stuff that I never would have gotten to read in the old system. [See what I did there? Those links go directly to Amazon so you can buy the books, if you are so inclined. That’s reducing the friction. And those are PG’s affiliate links so if you do buy, you’ll be helping out the site.]

Both of these effects increase the total number of books sold, but they also re-allocate those sales away from publisher midlist. Mike’s right about that (“Those sales come out of the midlist”), but he’s wrong about the solution. There’s no discovery problem. There’s a “the industry isn’t responding to market signals problem”. Publishers will die by the midlist if they try to pretend that nothing has changed. Big publishers who want to survive need to start drastically trimming the number of new books they put into print. They need to start putting their backlist up as ebooks for prices competitive with the folks I linked to above. I’ll save them (and me) some time. Somebody already figured this all out. Just go read Bob Mayer’s blog. That’s how the Big 5 would be running their operations if they had a clue.

“Readers will pay for content online so long as three conditions are met:

1 The content is worth paying for.2 The price is low.3 The transaction is easy.

“There are some trade-offs within those criteria. If you have an overwhelming need for a particular channel of content — the Financial Times, say, or The Economist — then you will accept a relatively high price, and quite a lot of friction in the process of subscribing.

“But for paid content to be the rule rather than the exception, publishers need to deliver on all three criteria at once.

“Filipino American authors and artists have come together to share their stories at the second Filipino American International Book Festival. Hosted by PAWA, a Northern CA based 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization and independent publisher of Filipino American lit. PAWA’s main goal is to create and encourage literature and arts for the preservation and enrichment of Filipino and Filipino American historical, cultural and spiritual values.”

What was billed as the first-ever Publishing Hackathon took place over the May 18-19 weekend at Alley NYC, a crowded co-working space in midtown Manhattan. Digital designers, programmers, engineers, and assorted techies gathered to devise the means to improve book discovery. About two hundred people — working in teams as small as a single individual to a group of seven — came up with thirty submissions with a simple, common objective: how to help readers find books that will appeal to them based on a variety of criteria, including their social media and browsing histories. Enabling readers of all ages with a cross-section of interests to connect with publishers is a major challenge for the book industry as it evolves ever more deeply into a digital universe.

It may seem surprising that hackathons — which have become a standard, competitive means for the development of apps, websites, and widgets — are a new concept to publishing. But for publishers as well as readers, traditional bookselling is increasingly dependent on the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth, the myriad ways to find books that are most likely to attract an audience.

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On the second afternoon, the teams were each given two minutes to make their presentation (a formidable test of their ability to frame what could be complex notions cogently), and an additional minute to respond to comments from the judges.

When readers talk to other readers about books, they speak in a language of tropes, character types, and hot button issues. They ask for spoilers and in depth details. They want to know if a character in book B is like the character in book A that they love.

A quick run down of forum topics at a popular romance gathering includes:

Fight club

Shy awkward / alpha

Books where heroine almost dies

When I gather books for the DA New Releases site, Calibre pulls down the metadata for a book including the “category” a book is placed in. Categories, generally speaking, are the BISAC codes assigned by the publisher (whether it be a publishing house or author). A BISAC is a classification system that “BISG develops and maintains a number of classification systems for both physical and digital products.

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Online discovery isn’t happening at the retailers, like it happens in the bookstore, because retailer sites aren’t set up for discovery beyond the front page. BN’s romance page has featured 50 Shades above the scroll for months. Scrolling down, you get horizontal scrollbars for things like “Coming Soon”, “Bestsellers”, “New releases” but a quick scroll through both and you begin to see repetitive titles. This is not hand curated like a table in the retail store (or if it is, the curation is poor because the constant repetitive nature of the titles reduce visibility of other titles). Further, little information is imparted about the book unless the reader can guess from the title and the cover exactly what the genre or subgenre is on it. No wonder romance cover artists rely so heavily on the naked chest. BN offers no advanced search function.

Amazon hews closely to the BISAC codes, as does BN. Amazon does offer an advanced search wherein you can filter by subject matter and keyword as well as publisher and date published. However, how many users realize that a) it is available and b) can figure out how to use it.

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None of the three major retailers allow you to exclude titles. For instance, maybe I want to see all contemporary romances but none with a title of billionaire. But these complaints address just the existing flawed search functions.

Beyond how rudimentary and unhelpful the search features are at these retailers is the fact that the search terms are designed to speak to readers. Amazon has tried to address this by allowing readers to add “tags” to books but the tag feature has been sorely abused. Many of the books at AllRomance have no tags either.

Passive Guy comes to computer-based searching with past work experience at LexisNexis, the company which pioneered computerized legal research and, later, computerized business and political information research.

For legal research, you can’t miss anything. Even a single court opinion can blow up your case or, if used well, blow up the opposing party’s case. On the other hand, a search that generates a list of 200 case opinions averaging 15 pages each doesn’t help because you’re swamped with case opinions that are not really relevant to the legal issue you’re looking at.

If you know what you’re doing, you can use the Lexis search engine with great precision to pull needles from haystacks comprised of collections of cases and statutes or millions of academic papers. It’s miles more powerful than Google. Unfortunately, it’s also very expensive to use and PG was sad when his Lexis password eventually expired several years after he left the company.

PG thinks that one of Amazon’s big advantages over other etailers is more sophisticated methods of discovery. That said, he agrees with Dear Author that, given the range of possibilities for computer-based searching, Amazon is far from ideal for discovery. He also thinks that BISAC codes are primitive holdovers from a mainframe world that work much better for bookstores than they do for readers.

Given the rapid proliferation of new genres and sub-genres, rigid categories such as BISAC are always going to be outdated and of marginal value. A category comprised of 200,000 books is essentially useless for a reader. She usually wants a category comprised of something like 25 books she hasn’t already read. And the 25 best-selling romance books is not the kind of subjective category that is useful for most romance readers. Romance readers recognize many more categories of books than BISAC or Amazon do.

If anybody at Amazon asked PG for advice (they haven’t and he doesn’t expect them to do so), he would tell them to develop their search function to be much more dynamic, flexible and accessible to customers.

Amazon has the data to provide Frequently Bought Together and Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought information for a particular book and should expose more levers to allow customers to use these tools. If a customer is so inclined, allow him/her to perfect a search or multiple searches that bring up the kind of books he/she wants.

At LexisNexis, gobs of legal case opinions swarm into the computers every day. For purposes of gathering cases into useful libraries – criminal law, real estate law, entertainment law, etc., etc., the computers perform content analysis and automatically sort the opinions into many different libraries. Then, an attorney can limit searches to opinions that reside in the real estate library without seeing irrelevant criminal cases. As the law changes, the case-sorting algorithms change.

Another way of helping an Amazon customer to find books to purchase would be to permit the customer to list his/her 25 favorite books, then ask Amazon’s search engine to generate a list that applies the Frequently Bought Together and Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought data to those books and create a list of five or ten or twenty-five other books that are most similar to the 25 favorite books. Give the customer a lever that allows him/her to limit the list to books published in the last two years or five years to remove moldy oldies.

Then allow the customer to save that search and ask Amazon to send an email that includes updated search results every couple of weeks. Since Amazon knows what books the customer has purchased, screen out books the customer already owns from the search results and give the customer a button to indicate that she’s already read a recommended book. The fact that a customer already owns or has already read a book is an important fact that should be rolled into the suggestion algorithm. If a customer buys a book from the recommended list, that fact similarly provides information for the suggestion algorithm. Amazon could also include a button the customer could click on for a listed book that was definitely not what the customer was looking for and that negative rating would be further information for the suggestion algorithm.

If PG were playing with Amazon’s data, he would take advantage of the fact that the company has the full text of every ebook it sells sitting on its hard drives and use artificial intelligence techniques to derive data from that text. For non-fiction books, full-text search could be valuable to customers on its own as another way to sell them more books – allow a customer to perform a search of the text of all information systems books for the terms, “denial of service attacks” and “foreign intelligence services” then provide a list of books that include those terms.

However, full-text search is old stuff that LexisNexis and its competitors have been doing for ages. It would be much more interesting to use full-text to conduct content analysis of fiction books to help group similar books together into new genres regardless of BISAC categories or author-provided tags.

Mix sales data in with content analysis, you’ll make it more likely that customers will find books they’ll enjoy – Viking vampire romances or Jane Austen look-alikes. As an additional benefit, this kind of information would give Amazon unparalleled insight into emerging book trends. Among other beneficiaries, the folks at Amazon Publishing could use this kind of information for acquisition strategies.

PG will stop now because he knows very few people get turned on by the many possibilities presented by mining large data sets or enjoy discussions of computerized search and artificial intelligence.